ruggednesses and irregularities that characterize the strong and
somewhat one-sided development of genius as contrasted with the regular
features and insipid perfectness of things wrought on a small scale. If
idealizing means the filing-away of jagged edges--and surely it does
not--Mr. Champneys has left us to do our own idealizing. The faults that
marred Purcell's _Life of Manning_ are here avoided, and yet truth is no
whit the sufferer in consequence.

In speaking of Patmore as a thinker and a poet, we do not mean to
dissociate these two functions in his case, but only to classify him
(according to his own category) with those "masculine" poets whose power
lies in a beautiful utterance of the truth, rather than in a truthful
utterance of the beautiful.

We propose, however, to occupy ourselves with the matter rather than the
mode of Patmore's utterance; with that truth which he conceived himself
to have apprehended in a newer and clearer light than others before him;
and this, because he does not stand alone, but is the representative and
exponent of a certain school of ascetic thought whose tendency is
diametrically contrary to that pseudo-mysticism which we have dealt with
elsewhere, and have ascribed to a confusion of neo-platonic and
Christian principles. This counter-tendency misses the Catholic mean in
other respects and owes its faultiness, as we shall see, to some very
analogous fallacies. If in our chapter on "The True and the False
Mysticism," it was needful to show that the principles of Christian
monasticism and contemplative life, far from in any way necessarily
retarding, rather favour and demand the highest natural development of
heart and mind; it is no less needful to assign to this thought its true
limits, and to show that the noblest expansion of our natural faculties
does not conflict with or exclude the principles of monasticism. I think